Category Archives: כתבות אמצע

The Technion is the leading university in Israel and Europe, and one of the top one hundred in the world in terms of patents approved in the United States. This is reflected in the ranking by the National Academy of Inventors (NAI), based on data from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) for the year 2023.

The updated ranking places the Technion at 65th in the world, with 48 patents in the past year – a few places behind Yale, New York University, and the University of Washington. In first place in Israel and Europe, and also among the top 20 in the world for the number of approved patents in the United States, relative to the research faculty. This marks a rise of three places from 2022 when the Technion was ranked 68th in the world. The ranking editors note that: “the list highlights the importance of patents in the application of research and innovation in academia, as well as the central role of academic institutions in the field of innovation.”

Rona Samler, General Manager of T3 – the Technology Transfer Office at the Technion, expressed, “I am immensely proud to spotlight our remarkable achievement for the third consecutive year, securing the top position in Israel and Europe and among top 20 universities worldwide for the number of granted US patents per faculty. This outstanding feat underscores the scientific excellence of our esteemed faculty members and highlights T3’s leadership in effective intellectual property management. Our unwavering commitment to innovation and collaboration remains a driving force behind impactful contributions to the global landscape, solidifying Technion’s reputation as a pioneer in cutting-edge research and technological advancements.”

Prof. Lihi Zelnick-Manor

Prof. Lihi Zelnik-Manor, Executive Vice President for Innovation and Industry Relations at the Technion, commented: “the Technion invests significantly in fostering innovation and developing technological breakthroughs. As the Executive Vice President for Innovation and Industry Relations, I am proud to be part of an institution that invests resources in the technological market, ensuring that research breakthroughs do not remain confined to the boundaries of academia but positively impact the industrial sector and, consequently, society as a whole. Our commitment to bridging the gap between academia and industry is a central part of the Technion’s mission, as we strive to cultivate partnerships and promote innovation for the benefit of dual-world developments.”

The Technion’s patent portfolio currently includes 1815 registered patents and patent applications. The processes of commercialization and patent registration are led by T3 – Technion’s Technology Transfer Office, which collaborates extensively with industry and promotes the establishment of startup companies based on Technion’s technical knowledge—approximately 15 new startups each year.

The Technion has been transforming itself in the last few decades and, as a result of substantial efforts, the percentage of female undergraduate students has consistently increased. This year, half of all new undergraduate students are women. The share of women pursuing advanced degrees is also on the rise.

Doctoral student Keren Or Greenberg in the Ullman Building’s new nursing room

A comprehensive study among female students and alumnae, led by Vice President for Diversity and Inclusion Professor Adi Salzberg, revealed the need to establish a nursing and lactation room in every academic faculty. As a result of the survey, the University charted the exact requirements, set uniform standards for nursing rooms on campus, and purchased suitable furniture and equipment for each faculty, as well as for the Zielony Student Union Building and the Ullman Building, where all first-year students have classes.

Liza Shamaliov Zaretski, who headed the project

The project was headed by Liza Shamaliov Zaretski, who manages the Facebook groups “Women Students at the Technion” and “Moms at the Technion.” She explains that, “in December 2022, I checked the nursing room situation on campus. Since many students return to the University after maternity leave, and combine research with being a mom, I decided to take up the gauntlet and ensure that they would have nursing rooms that are close, accessible, and equipped – a room to nurse and to pump milk during the first few months after childbirth, which would make it easier to return to the University without having to give up nursing.”

All of the nursing rooms at the Technion are air conditioned and equipped with a nursing chair, a diaper changing station, a special refrigerator to store breast milk, and a work area that includes a computer table and chair. There is either a kitchenette next to each room or a sink inside each room for washing the pumping equipment.

“The welcome growth in the number of women studying at the Technion means that it is all the more important to provide the new mothers among them with suitable and respectful conditions for nursing or pumping milk in every department and faculty where they study or work,” says Prof. Adi Salzberg. “Maneuvering between family life and work or studies is often difficult and challenging – even more so for nursing mothers. The new nursing rooms are another way to help these women feel at home at the Technion. I would like to thank all those who worked on this important project and made it a success: deans and administrative heads; Deputy Director General of Operations Zahava Laniado; Efrat Barkai-Goral, who is charged with diversity, equality, and inclusion; and Liza Shamaliov Zaretski, who led the project with great dedication.”

Technion researchers have discovered a new phenomenon where sperm from mice can induce non-reproductive cells from hamsters to fuse and form a syncytia – a cell with multiple nuclei.

The study, published in eLife, finds that the degree of this multinucleation is dependent on the fertilizing potential of the sperm. With further validation, the findings could be used in the development of new diagnostic tools for male infertility.

According to the World Health Organization, infertility is estimated to affect around 15% of the world’s population. Possible solutions include assisted reproductive techniques, such as in vitro fertilization (IVF). Previously, the hamster oocyte penetration test was used as a way to quantify the ability of a sperm to fertilize an egg – its fusogenic potential. However, this test is now considered obsolete, so there is no current standardized way to specifically analyze the fusogenic potential of a patient’s sperm.

“In mammals, the fusion of the sperm to the plasma membrane of the egg is mediated by the interaction between two proteins: IZUMO1 on the sperm, and JUNO on the egg, or oocyte,” explains co-author Clari Valansi, a lab manager at the Technion’s Faculty of Biology.

“In our previous work, we showed that mouse sperm can fuse to a type of connective cell called fibroblasts that have been altered to express JUNO,” adds co-author Nicolas Brukman, a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Biology. “In this study, we looked to further investigate the mechanisms of mammalian sperm-oocyte fusion.”

From left to right: Nicolas Brukman, Clari Valansi, and Prof. Benjamin Podbilewicz

The team started by incubating sperm from adult mice with Baby Hamster Kidney (BHK) cells that had been genetically modified to express JUNO. The team were surprised to discover that the sperm cells induced the BHK cells to fuse together and form one cell with multiple nuclei, or a syncytia. This effect was also observed when using the Human Embryonic Kidney cells.

They determined that this multinucleation was dependent on the presence of JUNO. However, this alone was not sufficient to induce the process. Rather, only cells with sperm fused to them formed syncytia, and the level of multinucleation was found to be dependent on the amount of sperm added to the cells. This suggests that the fusion of sperm with JUNO-expressing BHK cells is needed to induce the subsequent multinucleation of the BHK cells.

Next, the team asked whether the multinucleation required JUNO to be present on both fusing BHK cells. They employed a content-mixing experiment in which two populations of cells expressing different fluorescent markers were mixed and exposed to the mouse sperm. There was no BHK-BHK fusion when only one or neither of the cell populations expressed JUNO, suggesting that the sperm-induced multinucleation was indeed dependent on all of the BHK cells expressing JUNO. The team has dubbed this process SPICER (SPerm-Induced CEll-cell fusion Requiring JUNO).

Finally, the team evaluated the potential of SPICER in determining the fusogenic potential of sperm. They incubated mouse sperm in media that prevent capacitation – the process by which sperm acquires its fusogenic capacity – and found that they were subsequently unable to fuse to BHK cells and induce syncytia formation. Furthermore, fully capacitated sperm incubated with an antibody that blocks IZUMO1 also failed to form multinucleated cells. To examine whether the extent of cell-cell fusion relates to the sperm’s fertilizing capability, the team assessed the levels of multinucleation in parallel with the performance of the sperm during IVF. They detected a significant positive correlation between syncytia formation and the levels of fertilization. Taken together, these results suggest that SPICER relies on fully capacitated sperm, as well as the sperm’s fertilizing potential, supporting its potential use as a diagnostic tool for male infertility.

The authors call for more research in this area to validate their findings. Future experiments using human sperm would be required to fully realize the potential of SPICER in diagnostic settings.

“We have described a new phenomenon in which sperm cells can induce the fusion of cells expressing JUNO in culture, resembling the viral-like fusion of cells upon infection,” concludes co-author Prof. Benjamin Podbilewicz, of the Technion’s Faculty of Biology. “As the extent of multinucleation was correlated with the sperm’s fertilizing potential, SPICER could be a step towards the development of a reliable, fast, and simple method for predicting sperm function during the diagnosis of male infertility. It could also be used to predict the success of assisted reproductive techniques such as IVF, or in the agricultural world to evaluate the fertility of stud animals.”

Nicolas Brukman, Clari Valansi, and Prof. Benjamin Podbilewicz are inventors on a patent application filed by the Technion, based on this work.

Click here for the full article.

Researchers at the Technion’s Ruth and Bruce Rappaport Faculty of Medicine and the Rappaport Family Institute for Research in the Medical Sciences have discovered a subset of blood cells that predict the success of immunotherapy treatment. These findings are expected to streamline the process of matching an immunotherapy treatment to a specific patient, since it is very important to identify in advance those patients who will react to a given treatment.

The research published in Cancer Cell was led by doctoral student Madeleine Benguigui and post-doctoral fellow Dr. Tim J. Cooper, under the supervision of Professor Yuval Shaked of the Rappaport Faculty of Medicine. They contributed equally to the research and to the article. The translational research is based on RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq), analysis of existing data, pre-clinical models of cancer, and the corroboration of the findings in humans.

Photo, from left: Prof. Yuval Shaked, Madeleine Benguigui and Dr. Tim J. Cooper

Background
Immunotherapy, which is considered one of the most important breakthroughs in the treatment of cancer, is based on the understanding that the natural immune system excels at attacking cancer cells in a selective and precise manner. The problem is that, in many cases, the cancerous tumor tricks the immune system and prevents it from identifying the cells as enemies. Immunotherapy is based on the concept that, instead of attacking the cancer with chemotherapy drugs that also harm healthy tissue, it is preferable to boost the immune system with the goal to identify cancer cells as enemies and let it do the rest of the work on its own.

Despite the remarkable success of the immunotherapy approach for treating cancer, its effectiveness is still limited to around 40% of all patients. This means that many patients receive this harsh treatment without positive results. Consequently, it is crucial to attain a deep understanding of biological reactions to these treatments and to identify biomarkers that can predict the treatment’s future success.

Biomarkers are an important component of personalized medicine, which help physicians make educated medical decisions and formulate optimal treatment protocols adapted to the specific patient and their medical profile. Biomarkers are already being used for immunotherapy treatments, but they are obtained through biopsies – an invasive procedure that can endanger the patient. Moreover, this approach fails to sufficiently take into account the specific patient’s immune profile and its predictive capability is limited. For this reason, a great deal of research in this field – both in industry and in academia – strives to find new ways to predict which patients will respond to immunotherapy treatments.

The research itself
Technion researchers who focused on antibody-based immunotherapy discovered biomarkers that predict a specific patient’s response to the treatment. Since these biomarkers are in the bloodstream, they don’t require taking biopsies from the tumor – an invasive procedure that is not always feasible and, as mentioned, can sometimes endanger the patient.
In brief, the researchers discovered that a protein called STING, that activates the immune system, is triggered by cancerous growths, and is especially pronounced in cancer cells that will respond to immunotherapy treatment. This protein is manifested in interferon protein, which in turn stimulates neutrophils to be differentiated to a specific type (which expresses the protein Ly6Ehi). These neutrophils act directly on the immune system and stimulate it to target the cancerous tumor. Indeed, the researchers discovered that, these neutrophils may help the actual treatment, as their presence in the tumor prompts greater sensitivity to immunotherapy treatment.

The researchers inferred that testing the levels of Ly6Ehi neutrophils in the patient’s blood could serve as an efficient biomarker for predicting the response to immunotherapy treatment. The researchers tested these findings, which were based on pre-clinical studies, on patients with lung cancer and melanoma. These findings are consistent with the analysis of existing data on 1,237 cancer patients who underwent antibody-based immunotherapy treatments. Therefore, they demonstrated the neutrophils’ ability to predict with a high degree of precision, response to immunotherapy in humans.

The technology developed by Prof. Yuval Shaked’s research group was registered as a patent and it is currently in the midst of a tech transfer process with the company OncoHost, in order to continue its development. Prof. Shaked points out that the technology can be used with the ubiquitous flow cytometry device, which can be found in almost every hospital and is approved by the regulatory agencies.

Various research groups from Israel and around the world took part in the research, including physicians and researchers from the Hadassah, Rambam, and Sheba Medical Centers, as well as from the University of Haifa, Heidelberg University (Germany), and Yale University (USA).

The research was supported by a European Research Council (ERC) grant, the Bruce & Ruth Rappaport Cancer Research Center, Israel Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health (USA), Ariane de Rothschild Foundation (Ariane de Rothschild Women’s Doctoral Program scholarship), and the Rappaport Technion Integrated Cancer Center (RTICC) as part of the Steven & Beverly Rubenstein Charitable Foundation Fellowship Fund for Cancer Research.

Click here for the full article.

The prestigious Rothschild Prize was established by Yad Hanadiv (The Rothschild Foundation) in 1959 to support, encourage, and advance the sciences and humanities in Israel. Each year, it is awarded in recognition of outstanding research in seven disciplines. The festive prize ceremony will take place at the National Library in Jerusalem on September 18, 2024. The following day, there will be a scientific conference during which the laureates will present their achievements and explain their impact.

• Professor Michael (Miki) Elad of the Henry and Marilyn Taub Faculty of Computer Science and the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering will receive the Rothschild Prize in the Engineering category, in recognition of his pioneering contributions to the fields of signal and image processing and machine learning. Prof. Elad’s research has revolutionized the way digital data is treated, through groundbreaking tools and algorithms based on “sparsity” and advanced AI-based techniques. Over the years, his work introduced innovative machine-learning based models that offer dimensionality reduction for data sources and signals, which allows for their efficient processing for tasks such as compression, solving inverse-problems, and more. A unique characteristic of his work is the continuous bridge between deep theoretical and mathematical analysis on the one hand, and real world applications that benefit directly from these contributions on the other hand. Prof. Elad’s work led to the establishment of a new and rich research field that changed the way data is processed and treated, and his contributions inspire numerous researchers all over the world.
  

  Prof. Michael (Miki) Elad

• Distinguished Professor Mordechai (Moti) Segev of the Faculty of Physics and the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering will be awarded the Rothschild Prize in the Physics category in recognition of his pioneering contributions to the field of photonics that led to numerous important discoveries. Prof. Segev studies the interaction between light and matter l, focusing on understanding the change that the material undergoes when traversed by light. Prof. Segev, who also received the Israel Prize in 2014 and the EMET Prize in 2019, founded several research fields, which are currently being actively explored by hundreds of worldwide. About 10 years ago, Prof. Segev and his research group pioneered the field of topological photonics, which explores the phenomenon of light that is able to bypass defects and flaws, which it encounters while propagating in a photonic circuit . Later, the team invented the topological insulator laser – a system that enables numerous laser sources on a chip to function as a single powerful source. More recently, Prof. Segev’s group has been exploring light-matter interactions in time-varying materials and Photonic Time-Crystals, launching yet another new research area. Professor Segev is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities and of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) of the United States. However, above his personal achievements, Prof. Segev is committed to nurturing the next generation of researchers. Among the many students he mentored over the years, 25 are professors in both Israel and around the world, and many more working in the high-tech and defense industries.

Distinguished Prof. Mordechai (Moti) Segev

The field of photonic integrated circuits focuses on the miniaturization of photonic elements and their integration in photonic chips – circuits that carry out a range of calculations using photons, rather than electrons as are used in electronic circuits.

Silicon-based photonics is a developing field that is relevant for data centers, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and more. It enables an enormous improvement in the chips’ performance, and in their cost-benefit ratio as it is based on the very same prevalent raw material from chips in the world of electronics.

Prof. Guy Bartal

However, despite benefiting from the well-developed lithography production process, which enables precise production of the desired devices, the instruments don’t yet enable accurate mapping of the chip’s optic characteristics. This includes its internal light motion – a crucial capacity given the difficulty to model the effect of fabrication flaws and inaccuracies – due to the devices’ tiny dimensions.

Matan Iluz

A new article by researchers from Technion’s Andrew and Erna Viterbi Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering tackles this challenge, showing advanced light imaging in photonic circuits on chips. The research, which was published in the journal Optica, was led by Professor Guy Bartal, head of the Laboratory for Advanced Photonic Research, and doctoral student Matan Iluz, in collaboration with Professor Amir Rosenthal’s research group.  Graduate students Kobi Cohen, Jacob Kheireddine, Yoav Hazan and Shai Tsesses also took part in the research. The researchers harnessed the optical characteristics of silicon to map the light’s propagation without requiring an invasive action of any sort, which perturbs or alters the chip. This process includes mapping the light waves’ electric field and defining the elements that affect the light’s movement – waveguides and beam splitters.

Illustration of the optimal experiment and an actual photograph showing the light within an MMI device – a wave conductor that splits the beam into two inside the optic chip.

The process developed by the Technion researchers provides real-time images and video recordings of the light inside the photonic chip, without having to damage the chip and without losing any data. This new process is expected to improve the design, production, and optimization processes of photonic chips in a variety of fields, including telecommunications, high-performance computing, machine learning, measuring distances, medical imaging, sensing, and quantum computing.

The research is supported by the Helen Diller Quantum Center at the Technion, the Microelectronics and Nanoelectronics Research Center at the Technion, and the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

Click here for the paper in Optica

Prof. Keren Yizhak and Ofir Shorer, Ruth and Bruce Rappaport Faculty of Medicine and The Rappaport Family Institute for Research in the Medical Sciences at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology

A study done at the Technion shows that cell typing based on the expression of the metabolic genes enables prediction of the patient’s response to immunotherapy. Based on this discovery, the researchers created a tool to predict which patients will respond to this therapy, emphasizing the importance of metabolism in the tumor microenvironment.

The introduction of immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICI) anti-cancer drugs is one of the most important revolutions in cancer medicine. These drugs are designed to deactivate a natural immune mechanism that can work against patients in the case of a cancerous tumor.

Prof. Keren Yizhak

The immune mechanism in question is a network of “immune checkpoints.” Its role, under normal conditions, is to prevent the immune system from reacting with excessive force that could damage healthy cells. In other words, it is a mechanism that regulates the immune system.

However, when faced with a cancerous tumor, that same mechanism may prevent the immune system from attacking the cancer cells. This is the background against which ICI drugs were developed: these drugs deactivate this mechanism, thereby “freeing” the immune system to attack the cancer cells. These drugs have caused a revolution in cancer medicine, leading to inhibition of tumor growth in many kinds of cancer.

Still, these drugs are effective in less than 40% of patients. The rest of the patients suffer from side effects of the drug without enjoying any benefit. While there have been efforts to determine in advance whether or not the drugs will be effective for specific patients, current tools for doing so – for example, based on a genetic signature or the amount of different cells, – are not accurate.

Ofir Shorer

Researchers at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology have developed a new tool for this type of assessment, based on the metabolism of immune cells in the tumor microenvironment. Since cancer cells and the immune system cells are found in the same environment, they are fighting for resources. Quantifying their metabolic demands enables successful prediction of the effect of ICI drugs on the individual patient. To accomplish that they analyzed single-cell RNA-sequencing of 1,700 metabolic genes, taken from more than one million immune cells of cancer patients treated with ICI. . .

Link to the study:

https://www.cell.com/iscience/pdf/S2589-0042(23)02265-4.pdf

The study was supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology, the Israel Science Foundation (ISF) and The Bruce & Ruth Rappaport Cancer Research Center.

Prof. Keren Yizhak is a faculty member at the Ruth and Bruce Rappaport Faculty of Medicine and at the Henry and Marilyn Taub Faculty of Computer Science. Ofir Shorer is a graduate of the Technion’s Excellence Program and is currently a doctoral student in the prestigious M.D./Ph.D. track, which combines a research doctorate with clinical studies, under the guidance of Prof. Yizhak.